By: Christ the King Law Center (CKLC)
Editor's Note: The following is a modified abstract of a paper presented at a conference held by Christ the King Law Center (CKLC) on October 8, 2016 titled Make America Catholic Again! Portions of this abstract were also taken from traditional Catholic attorney and author Christopher Ferrara's book The Church and the Libertarian: A Defense of the Catholic Church's Teaching on Man, Economy, and State.
Not only the market, but the moral order of society generally would be protected by the legal prohibition of not only theft and violence, but also such evils contrary to the common good as abortion, divorce, adultery, sodomy, public lewdness and drunkenness, drunk driving, drug abuse and prostitution, homosexual "marriage" and adoption.
Freedom of speech would be restricted according to established categories of unprotected speech, including incitement to violence, publication or distribution of pornography, lewd and indecent public speech, libel and slander. In addition, the advocacy of legalized abortion and other grave offenses against the natural and divine law would be prohibited. It is madness to maintain that one has no right to engage in false advertising, for example, but that one must have every right to advocate and persuade others to commit mass murder in the womb or other such intolerable evils.
A Catholic movement for true liberty, freed from the oppression of a federal government, could actually reverse the status quo of political modernity where religion is concerned. Why not restore the civil law protection and promotion of religion that was a juridical norm for more than fifteen centuries before the disastrous "age of democratic revolution," hailed by Mises and Rothbard, foisted massive, secularized central governments on once Christian peoples?
The constitutional scholar Leonard Levy notes that as of the date of the First Amendment's ratification (1791), all but two of the new states had precisely what the U.S. Constitution forbids: religious tests for public office that disqualified atheists and agnostics from exercising political authority. Some states denied the franchise to atheists, prohibited court testimony by anyone "refusing to swear or affirm the existence of God," and barred atheists from holding or conveying property in trust. In general "anyone who rejected the doctrine of the Trinity suffered civil disabilities." Profanity and blasphemy were punishable as criminal offenses in every state, and the observance of the Christian Sabbath was legally enforced. In short, "Christianity was regarded by state jurists as part and parcel of the law of the land." [1] And so it had been throughout the Western world since the Edict of Milan.
The basic scheme predominating in the colonies, and to a great extent in most of the States for some time even after ratification of the Constitution and the First Amendment, reflected the logical and historically unbroken recognition that revealed religion must be the lodestar of the State, and as such must be protected and defended by law and made part of the juridical basis of public morality for the common good. As the Anglican scholar John Millbank has observed: "Once there was no secular. Instead there was the single community of Christendom with its dual aspects of sacerdotium and regnum.... The secular as a domain had to be created or imagined [Milbank's emphasis], both in theory and in practice." [2]
True liberty means taking back the public square for Christ by abolishing the great Liberal and Libertarian fiction of a realm of the secular, including a "free" market arbitrarily deemed exempt from the liberating law of the Gospel. Without federal interference (precluded by subsidiarity), at least the localities in which Catholics constitute a majority could recreate the conditions necessary for a Christian commonwealth. Why not a truly Catholic town, or even a Catholic city or a Catholic county?
[1] Leonard Levy, The Establishment Clause (North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 74-77 & 78 n. 7.
[2] Milbank, Theology and Social Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 9.
Editor's Note: The following is a modified abstract of a paper presented at a conference held by Christ the King Law Center (CKLC) on October 8, 2016 titled Make America Catholic Again! Portions of this abstract were also taken from traditional Catholic attorney and author Christopher Ferrara's book The Church and the Libertarian: A Defense of the Catholic Church's Teaching on Man, Economy, and State.
Not only the market, but the moral order of society generally would be protected by the legal prohibition of not only theft and violence, but also such evils contrary to the common good as abortion, divorce, adultery, sodomy, public lewdness and drunkenness, drunk driving, drug abuse and prostitution, homosexual "marriage" and adoption.
Freedom of speech would be restricted according to established categories of unprotected speech, including incitement to violence, publication or distribution of pornography, lewd and indecent public speech, libel and slander. In addition, the advocacy of legalized abortion and other grave offenses against the natural and divine law would be prohibited. It is madness to maintain that one has no right to engage in false advertising, for example, but that one must have every right to advocate and persuade others to commit mass murder in the womb or other such intolerable evils.
A Catholic movement for true liberty, freed from the oppression of a federal government, could actually reverse the status quo of political modernity where religion is concerned. Why not restore the civil law protection and promotion of religion that was a juridical norm for more than fifteen centuries before the disastrous "age of democratic revolution," hailed by Mises and Rothbard, foisted massive, secularized central governments on once Christian peoples?
The constitutional scholar Leonard Levy notes that as of the date of the First Amendment's ratification (1791), all but two of the new states had precisely what the U.S. Constitution forbids: religious tests for public office that disqualified atheists and agnostics from exercising political authority. Some states denied the franchise to atheists, prohibited court testimony by anyone "refusing to swear or affirm the existence of God," and barred atheists from holding or conveying property in trust. In general "anyone who rejected the doctrine of the Trinity suffered civil disabilities." Profanity and blasphemy were punishable as criminal offenses in every state, and the observance of the Christian Sabbath was legally enforced. In short, "Christianity was regarded by state jurists as part and parcel of the law of the land." [1] And so it had been throughout the Western world since the Edict of Milan.
The basic scheme predominating in the colonies, and to a great extent in most of the States for some time even after ratification of the Constitution and the First Amendment, reflected the logical and historically unbroken recognition that revealed religion must be the lodestar of the State, and as such must be protected and defended by law and made part of the juridical basis of public morality for the common good. As the Anglican scholar John Millbank has observed: "Once there was no secular. Instead there was the single community of Christendom with its dual aspects of sacerdotium and regnum.... The secular as a domain had to be created or imagined [Milbank's emphasis], both in theory and in practice." [2]
True liberty means taking back the public square for Christ by abolishing the great Liberal and Libertarian fiction of a realm of the secular, including a "free" market arbitrarily deemed exempt from the liberating law of the Gospel. Without federal interference (precluded by subsidiarity), at least the localities in which Catholics constitute a majority could recreate the conditions necessary for a Christian commonwealth. Why not a truly Catholic town, or even a Catholic city or a Catholic county?
[1] Leonard Levy, The Establishment Clause (North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 74-77 & 78 n. 7.
[2] Milbank, Theology and Social Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 9.
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